Law Commons^™

Rethinking Discrimination Law, Sandra F. Sperino

Michigan Law Review

Modern employment discrimination law is defined by an increasingly complex set of frameworks. These frameworks structure the ways that courts, juries, and litigants think about discrimination. This Article challenges whether courts should use the frameworks to conceptualize discrimination. It argues that just as faulty sorting contributes to stereotyping and societal discrimination, courts are using faulty structures to substantively limit discrimination claims. This Article makes three central contributions. First, it demonstrates how discrimination analysis has been reduced to a rote sorting process. It recognizes and makes explicit courts' methodology so that the structure of discrimination analysis and its effects can be …